God speaks to us through his Word, therefore our counseling theory begins with God. He is the ultimate reality that orients us to what is true and good and beautiful. We believe that he is our creator and he has revealed the best path that promotes human flourishing. God’s revealed word provides us with the grid through which to evaluate, understand, and address information, problems, and people. It puts us in the right context with the right description. His word is rich in its understanding of who we are and how we operate. It speaks into the suffering we experience, the sins we struggle with, and the confusion we often face and it offers comfort, clarity, and the power and hope to change. Scripture also shapes the details of our counseling, including how and why we listen, what is important, how we speak, when we speak, and what we say. As Christians, we desire to honor God’s revealed word and strive to subject all things under it. We want God’s word to be our interpretive lens to everything. We also recognize that we we need help understanding God’s word. Therefore, we value the church’s creeds and confessions and the wisdom of its theologians from past and present. This guards is from biblicism or fundamentalism in our approach, and what C.S. Lewis called chronological snobbery.

We believe in God’s common grace to all humanity. Therefore, we seek to apply modern day insights in our counseling practice even if those insights come from outside the Christian faith. We believe that all truth is God’s truth and we desire to give God glory for his truth no matter where it is found. As we engage other forms of therapy who do so with a hermeneutic of openness and suspicion. We take seriously their observations, techniques, and explanations and strive to bring them in line with a Biblical framework. This may involve critiquing, reinterpreting, evaluating, discarding, converting, or applying those observations, techniques, and explanations. We approach this endeavor with much humility and a willingness to learn from, be challenged by, question, and consider other views of care.

The Gospel of grace is our hope. In this life we need more than what this life can offer us. We need more than practical steps and helpful techniques. We need more than a list of rules or good examples. Change is not simply accomplished by trying harder or believing more. It is fundamentally connected to God’s grace—a grace that melts our hearts and reshapes them into something new and beautiful. Because the gospel is the good news about all that Jesus is and all that Jesus has done, it applies to our entire life, not just our conversion. We never outgrow our need for Jesus, and therefore we never outgrow our need for the message of grace that is presented in the gospel. Because the gospel assures us that we are God’s beloved children, united to Christ, it motivates and sustains us to wholeheartedly pursue a life of mission and mercy. This gospel of grace is at the heart of every counseling conversation. We desire our posture, words, and interventions to be filled with grace and point to the God of grace. As counselors we, too, drink deeply from this life-giving grace. We seek to take it to heart before we attempt to export it to others. We recognize our inherent weaknesses and look to the sovereign God who has chosen to use vessels of clay as means to accomplish his purposes and to display his treasure. 

Every person comes to us with a complex history and a unique personality so we don’t try to offer easy answers. We are embodied souls and situationally and relationally embedded, therefore, our counsel is holistic. We recognize the relational, emotional, spiritual, mental, volitional, and physical dimensions of a person and the dynamic interplay between them all. We acknowledge that all of these dimensions fundamentally relate to God in some shape or fashion. Because we are holistically minded, our counseling could include resolving past issues, addressing trauma, changing cognitive distortions, emotional regulation, seeking medical attention, learning relational skills, reading scripture, developing healthy routines, prayer, teaching coping skills, repentance, faith, love, pycho-social-spiritual education, exposing idols, and so on. In the end, we desire to help people grow and change in a holistic manner. This means we desire to see people grow in areas of character and holiness as well as health and functioning.

We know the unique challenges of living and ministering cross-culturally. We ourselves have lived that life so we get it. Issues like team conflict, securing visas, threats of death, political turmoil, language learning (and re-learning), sickness and poor medical systems, providing education for children, raising and maintaining support, helping children navigate the challenges of being a TCK, evacuations, culture shock, and living in two worlds, can weigh heavily on your hearts. As we hear your story we hear it through the lens of your experience as a global worker. 

To say that we are trauma informed is one way of saying that we take suffering very seriously. Our world is broken in so many ways and we are victim to that. Trauma is a specific form of suffering that impacts us in profound ways. It affects our view of life, God, self, and others. It impacts us physically, relationally, spiritually, and personally. It fragments us. In understanding the complexity of trauma we seek to be informed by clinicians who specialize in this area while at the same time mining God’s word for his wisdom. The road to healing is often slow and hard. But we have a God who speaks into our trauma and names the evils within and and the evils without.